University of California Sued For Role of Race in Admissions

Two weeks after the trial ended in Harvard’s Asian discrimination lawsuit, an academic has filed a suit against the University of California system alleging the school of using race as criteria in admission procedures.

Richard Sander, who studies affirmative action, has asked the university in his lawsuit to give him access to the documents which can prove his allegations, according to a The New York Times report.

Sander suspects that the university system introduced race as a factor in admission after it received flak over declining enrollment of black and Hispanic students.

“To me, this has always been a civil rights issue,” Sander told The Times. “If you cut off the data, you’re saying we don’t think the public has a right to examine any of the factors determining admission or success at the university.”

He is seeking data on grades, majors and how long it took the students to graduate among others.

Earlier this month, the trial came to an end in the Asian-American discrimination lawsuit filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) organization against Harvard.

The university continues to deny that it discriminated against Asian applicants, while the student group is still adamant on its stand that university applies a system aimed at maintaining a virtually unalterable proportion of students from different ethnic groups.

In September, the federal administration had also started a civil rights investigation against the Yale University to find out if it treated Asian applicants differently during the admission process on the basis of their race.